At the Odéon theater,  The Emigrants become fleshless specters

“Against insomnia, I have tried everything, baths with special salts, ceilings covered with cork to dampen the noise of the neighbors… When there is really nothing left to do, I go to the theater,” said , pulling on his tan, Groucho Marx. Well, we found an excellent sleeping pill, money back as the advertising formula says: The Emigrants, directed by Krystian Lupa.

In memory, rarely - except perhaps a curling competition, a John Cage concert or Andy Warhol's Sleep - have we attended such a soporific spectacle. It is an adaptation of a story by the German writer W.G. Sebald (1944-2001).

This staging got people talking. A short warning: “Following the cancellation of the show at the Comédie de Genève and the Festival d'Avignon, the performances of Les Émigrants are finally maintained at the Odéon, with a somewhat modified schedule: the previews of the 9th and January 10 and the first two performances on January 11 and 12 are canceled; the first performance takes place on January 13. » It is said, behind the scenes, that the Polish maestro has an irascible character and fragile nerves. No matter, the result is there and we must conclude that the mountain has given birth to a weasel.

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The Emigrants deals with two broken destinies, two internal exiles told by Sebald (played by Pierre Banderet who does not skimp on the silences), narrator-investigator in search of a lost time. First of all, the story of Paul Beyreter (Manuel Vallade). In the 1950s, he was Sebald's teacher in Bavaria. The play begins with the reading of a letter. The writer learns that Beyreter ended his life in 1984. We then trace the sting of this man's life, his joys and anxieties delivered between filmed scenes and on-set scenes. Let's admit that the mixture of genres is sometimes quite grandiose but that is not enough, oh no!, for the spectator to fully adhere to this existence gradually undermined by historical upheavals.

Paul was a good teacher, a dreamy pacifist, but the war got to him. We learn that he was removed from teaching on the pretext of having a quarter of Jewish blood. For two hours we see Paul with his students, Paul walking on a train track (quite a symbol), Paul in the fields with a butterfly net (Nabokov's?), Paul conversing endlessly - introspecting - with Helen (sweet and melancholy Mélodie Richard). The verbal engine seems to run on empty sacrificing narrative dynamism: Paul who goes from a table to a bed, from a bed to a table in a beautiful imposing setting, high dilapidated blue-verdigris walls. Living room in ruins like the characters.

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Characters? Specters, rather. Flesh without skeleton or skeletons without flesh. No doubt this is why the director struggles to bring these broken beings to life. It revolves around its distraught actors without ever really animating them. Maybe that was his goal. Perhaps we understood nothing of his clever awkwardness. After a quarter of an hour intermission, the room became a little sparse. The late depressive teacher, let's move on to the sad story of the author's great-uncle, a certain Ambros Adelwarth, a homosexual valet (played by Jacques Michel, Ambros old, and Pierre-François Garel, Ambros young).

Our valet, born in 1886, left Germany in 1910 to emigrate to the United States, where he became the butler of the Solomons, a wealthy New York Jewish banking family. He also becomes the lover of Cosmo (Aurélien Gschwind), son of the house, a casino addict who is said to have the silhouette of Christ. We follow the couple in their chic wandering life. From Monte Carlo to Jerusalem. In the Holy City, they stay on the top floor of an open-air hotel. Gaze at the stars.

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Cosmo is hot? Here he is in kangaroo underwear. Cosmo is cold? Here he is in a djellaba. They are ghosts who sometimes take shape again on a screen or in a photo album. They will both end up under electroshock in a HP. There are grotesque moments, unworthy of a great director who pushes himself a little too hard. So we pinch ourselves not to chuckle when Cosmo, filmed naked, rants about bistro metaphysical considerations. And these inner monologues that come like hair in soup! All the characters – except Sebald – have a headache. Migraines or neuralgia. We understand why. The Emigrants is a play about internal exile and we remain, despite all our efforts, on the outside.

Les Émigrants, Odéon (Paris 6th), until February 4. Such. : 01 44 85 40 40. www.theatre-odeon.eu